Yahoo email users hoping to spread the word of the Occupy Wall Street protests ran into an unforseen obstacle on Tuesday when their messages containing links to the website occupywallst.org were blocked from being sent because an online filter deemed them “suspicious activity.”
Although several Yahoo users and media outlets jumped to the conclusion that Yahoo was deliberately censoring the emails due on the basis of the anti-establishment content, the company quickly responded via Twitter, saying that “It was not intentional & caught by our spam filters. It is resolved, but may be a residual delay.”
The company also thanked the blog Think Progress for bringing the matter to their attention via a post on the subject.
The anti-corporate protests organized by progressive magazine Adbusters and endorsed and heavily promoted by the hacktivist collective Anonymous have been raging in New York’s financial district since Saturday. So far, seven protesters have been arrested, five of them for wearing masks, a violation of an antique anti-mask law on the city’s books.
But supporters of the demonstration, who have relied on social media to get their messages across and rally others to their cause, hardly expected that their email service would fail them at such a critical time.
At the same time, Yahoo has raised the ire of free speech advocates before for its cooperation with the Chinese government in censoring search results on the Chinese mainland. Yahoo has also blocked links to file-sharing search engines such as FilesTube through its Yahoo Messenger service.
See the errant filter in action in the YouTube video below, as demonstrated by a Yahoo user.
Late update: Yahoo responds to Idea Lab via email, asserting that the problem was actually first observed and reported yesterday and has since been corrected. “Unfortunately, the domain ‘occupywallst.org’ was being caught by one of our spam filters when some users tried to send messages containing it. This was a false positive which we corrected yesterday. However, there may still be residual delay (up to 24 hours) for users trying to send emails with that phrase. Thank you to the Yahoo! Mail users who notified us about this.”
idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com, September 20, 201